music stars––the famed 400 block of
downtown Nashville’s Broadway Avenue,
formerly the site of the Grand Ole Opry
and the Ryman Auditorium.

NEW ORLEANS

Groove Interrupted: Loss, Renewal,and the Music of New Orleans. ByKeith Spera. 2011. St. Martin’s, $25.99(9780312552251).

New Orleans has always been a musical seedbed, come hell or high water, as
Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Spera discovered in the wake of Hurricane Katrina
when he got to know the musicians who
stayed, including Clarence “Gatemouth”
Brown, Aaron Neville, Allen Toussaint,
and Fats Domino.

Brothers offers a uniquely perceptive
look at New Orleans’ rich, rolling musical
culture fed by French, Spanish, Creole,
and African tributaries, and sustaining
numerous musicians, prominent among
them the one and only Louis Armstrong.

NE W YORK

Harlem: The Four Hundred Year Historyfrom Dutch Village to Capital of BlackAmerica. By Jonathan Gill. 2011. Grove,paper, $20 (9780802145741).

Gill offers an exquisitely detailed
account of Harlem’s long, dynamic, art-filled history, shaped by waves of overseas
immigrants and African American migrants, and punctuated so indelibly by the
Harlem Renaissance.

An industrial wasteland with Oz-like
views of Manhattan and strict ethnic and
racial demarcations, Williamsburg was
hardly welcoming to scruffy art kids such
as Anasi, yet it proved to be the ideal hot
spot for wildly innovative, downright

Carson chronicles with vivid detail
and full appreciation the world-shaking
rise of Detroit’s indelible music, from
John Lee Hooker to Iggy Pop, along
with the stars of Motown, among them
Smokey Robinson, the Supremes, and
Marvin Gaye.

LONDON

The First Bohemians: Life and Art inLondon’s Golden Age. By Vic Gatrell.2015. IPG/PenguinUK, $27.95(9780718195830).

Drawing on art, literary, and social history, Gatrell explains how and why the
one-square-mile area around Covent Garden in eighteenth-century London became
“the world’s first creative ‘bohemia.’”

LOS ANGELES

The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies.By David Thomson. 2012. Farrar, paper,$18 (9780374534134).

Hollywood is a mega hot spot, as film
expert Thomson so richly and provocatively elucidates in this compelling history
studded with dozens of capsule biographies of film greats working in every
aspect of the industry.

As Los Angeles’ sunny dreamscape gave
way to the harsh realities of the 1970s,
artists responded accordingly, including
Chicano street muralists Salvador Torres and Judith Baca, and conceptual and
performance artists James Turrell and
Chris Burden.

Los Angeles in the 1960s was a wide-open place of rampant creativity. At the
nucleus was the Ferus Gallery and such
trailblazing artists as Edward Kienholz, Ed
Ruscha, Robert Irwin, and John Baldessari.

Perl tells the many-faceted story of
mid-twentieth-century art in New York
City, portraying artists as diverse as Joseph
Cornell and Donald Judd, and attesting
to how the city itself inspired abstract expressionism, pop art, and new realism.

Strausbaugh’s sizzling and capacious
history of bohemian Greenwich Village
spotlights the likes of Edna St. Vincent
Millay, James Baldwin, Bob Dylan, and
Willem de Kooning as they “collided and
fused like subatomic particles in an accelerator, unleashing an explosion of creativity.”

Roe continues the story of Paris as art
incubator that she began in The Private
Lives of Impressionists (2006). Her second
group biography spans the first decade in
the twentieth century, when the emerging
avant-garde included Picasso, Matisse,
Braque, and André Derain.

Chaim Soutine arrived in Paris in 1913
as part of a wave of Russian Jewish artists
fleeing persecution, and found tentative
sanctuary in Montparnasse, among other
brilliant, struggling immigrant artists,
including Chagall and Modigliani.